


Four

by songofsunset



Series: Mantid Aliens [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 02:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13180668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songofsunset/pseuds/songofsunset
Summary: "Four’s funeral had been full of flowers."





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, vaguely, from some sort of an AU where Megan didn't die like in the original story, or Six found out earlier. These things can be flexible :P

Six was fine.

Six was always fine.

Six had to be fine- anything else was simply not an option.

“Are you sure?” Megan had asked, earlier, after they’d gotten back from the meeting. “She was a friend of yours, and I know I didn’t like her much, but-“

‘I’m sure,’ Six had signed with his forelegs, perversely grateful that his biology meant he didn’t have to deal with things like avoiding human eye contact. “I’ll be fine. Go take care of your child.”

Megan looked skeptical, but her daughter was crying at the poor babysitter, so she left Six on the porch and went in to deal with the situation.

It was winter now, or as close as it could get on this part this planet. The animals were still and silent and Megan claimed that most of the trees wouldn’t loose their leaves until spring. A cool breeze blew, making the canopy of leaves and branches and hanging moss pulse and dance like a living thing.

Crickets chirped in the distance, and Six idly chirped back at them. An old habit Megan laughed at. When she’d been a child, she’d assumed he could understand them. Really, it was something more like talking to animals, or babies. You don’t expect to be understood, but you do it anyways, because sometimes these things aren’t about being understood or not.

The baby inside had stopped crying now. Rightfully, the babysitter should have left already, but she was probably lingering with Megan inside to give him some more time alone out here.

They’d just gotten back from a funeral for one of his oldest friends. She wasn’t dead- not in the human way of things, but the humans had insisted on holding a funeral, and Six hadn’t had the heart to stop them. None of the Mantids in attendance had quite understood, but the daughter-replacement had attended, and preened under all the attention to her past-self, even if she’d greatly unnerved all the humans just by existing, by knowing who they were, by knowing everything her predecessor had known but caring about it differently.

He’d offered to bring her back home with him, but she’d chosen to stay up north and continue her predecessor’s research. Six was expecting his first message from her within the next couple of days. He hoped she’d still like him.

The humans had expected Four to just be gone, when they’d found out she was dying. That’s how humans worked. When they broke, they didn’t get to reset things, to let someone try again in their stead. They just had to push through, or choose to die a permanent death, the sort Mantids mourned and held remembrances for. 

It seemed unfair to him that humans were expected to survive, to keep going, even if they were broken. It seemed like an inefficient way to do things, to let all that experience and knowledge go to waste so easily. It seemed cruel to make them suffer like that.

Megan stepped out onto the porch, child in her arms, letting the door fall closed softly behind her.

They stood there for a moment, watching the winter-still swamp outside.

“Hey,” Megan said, and Six flicked an antennae in acknowledgement. “You okay? You’re not gonna go out on me like Four did?”

It had been unpleasant, all told. Four had been taken, and the humans had managed to get her back, started repairing her injuries. They’d thought she was safe, apparently, thought they could help her recover and didn’t understand why she was getting her affairs in order. The humans claimed there was long-term care for these things, and that they had started preparing it for her. When her brain had stopped, it had been a surprise to everyone except Six. When Four’s daughter had started eating her way out of the corpse, Six had had to shoo everyone away and deal with the situation himself.

He’d wondered why human media never addressed this type of death, but he’d assumed it was a cultural thing, some sort of taboo. It had never even occurred to him that they just- didn’t have it. It had never occurred to him that humans would be forced to survive.

Mental trauma wasn’t fatal to humans, and Six wasn’t sure if that was the most badass thing he’d ever heard, or the most horrifying.

Six rounded on Megan before he even realized his own intention, signing urgently instead of answering her question. ’Have you ever survived? Have you also suffered this sort of thing? Have most people? How many humans that I know are hurting and I knew nothing about it?’

“It- it’s pretty normal, I think, for us,’ Megan said, shifting her child in her arms for a better grip. ‘Most people go through these sorts of things at some point.”

Six hissed quietly in distress, and Megan hurried to explain.

“I mean- you knew my parents. They weren’t super great. My brain got some weird patterns from that, from some other things while you were away. I don’t think there’s anyone that’s really okay, not like you mean it.”

‘Everyone?’ Six signed, his gesture broad and horrified.

“It’s just how we work, Six. We start out pretty baseline, except when we don’t, and we just sort of- collect from there.” Megan cupped her child’s small head in one hand, nearly a perfect fit. “Even this kiddo is starting to build up patterns. I’m gonna do my best to make sure they’re happy and healthy ones, but I’m not gonna be able to save her from everything. Stuff is gonna happen to her, and maybe her brain will freak out a little bit, and hopefully she’ll get through it okay.”

Six’s distressed hissing had scaled up into an ongoing clicking noise now. ‘You can’t even protect her! You can’t even protect your child!’ he signed. ‘How do you live like that! How do you go on when they might be hurt so badly, and you can’t even do anything to stop it from happening???’

Megan smiled, and why was she smiling, how could she be smiling? Nothing was okay about this, all his human friends had been hurting this entire time and there was nothing he could do about it and-

She handed him her daughter, helped him position the child in his forearms like she usually did, made sure everything was secure. Then she stepped back, still smiling.

“You get other people to help you protect them. Keep an eye on her for me sometimes, okay?”

The child was soft and warm and so very very fragile. Six clutched her a little closer, and she burbled at him gently.

Six would be fine, and he’d make sure this child was fine as well.


	2. Chapter 2

Four’s funeral had been full of flowers.

Six hadn’t known why, when she asked him. She vaguely remembered that he’d always been more interested in human culture and traditions, while Four had gone off learning science with a single-minded passion that her replacement couldn’t remember feeling for anything since her carapace had hardened and her memories had started being properly recorded again.   
  
Six said that it was probably just one of those weird human things, putting flowers everywhere at a time like this. She thought they were pretty. She knew Four wouldn’t have. 

She’d asked him what kind of flowers these were, and he’d tilted his head thoughtfully and said he didn’t know that either. He’d waved Megan over from where she’d been standing with a group of Four’s old co-workers, and together they made her tell them the names of all the flowers they could find, daisies and baby’s breath and lilies and carnations- and camellias. The camellias were deep red, nearly the same color as her newly hardened shell, and when the people running the funeral had asked if she wanted to keep any of the flowers, to bring them home to her new-old-silent apartment, she’d asked for the camellias.

They’d fallen apart a few days later, and when she told Six he said that she’d been supposed to keep them in water, that they were still alive enough to drink, even if they’d been cut off from their main plant.

This fascinated her.

And then she went into work, and there was nothing but petri dishes and sterile gloves and charts and meticulously labeled vials and she wanted to climb the walls and cling to the ceiling and hiss and hiss until people just left her alone and stopped expecting things from her.

But these experiments had been important to her predecessor and she felt obligated to finish them, so instead she nodded and waggled her antennae and listened politely to her coworker’s concerns and didn’t climb out the window and hide on the roof nearly as often as she wanted to.  

Four hadn’t cared much about the roof garden. It was a scraggly thing, only a handful of bushes and some potted grass, more a place for employees to visit on their smoke breaks than any sort of natural experience.

Four’s replacement loved it.

Sometimes she’d find ants crawling over the concrete pots and follow their winding trail back to the nest. Sometimes she’d break browning leaves off the bushes and crumble them into dust, just to watch it be carried away by the wind. Sometimes she’d crouch real low and look at all the tiny green plants growing in the shelter of the bushes, all their different leaf shapes and hopeful root patterns- and inevitably, someone would come find her, ask her to come answer their questions, and she’d sneak a look back at the plants as she followed them back inside, feeling like a drowning man taking one last gasp of air before being enveloped in glass and concrete.

She took to harassing the botanists on her lunch breaks. At first she’d just stared longingly in their general direction- her predecessor had known the botany labs were down the hall, but had never particularly cared, always more caught up in her disease cultures. Four’s replacement, on the other hand, found herself zoning off, imagining what wonders their labs might be hiding, and finally had just marched over one day and demanded to be let in.

An advantage of being the only alien working in an entire government facility is that everyone knew who she was, even if she hadn’t picked a name yet, and no one was willing to say no to her. Sure, the managers of the botany lab could have demanded to know what she needed in their labs, but it was easier for them just to let her in and keep an eye to make sure she didn’t screw any of their experiments up.

Not that she would, hah. She remembered that much from her predecessor, and she darn well knew how not to screw stuff up in a lab situation.

Mostly, she just sat in the greenhouses and watched the plants, watched how they grew and changed. Sometimes she read the books they left out on the counters. Eventually, the botanists just ignored her.

———

It changes one morning while she’s hiding on the roof before work.

“Oh!” says someone behind her, and she turns around, bracing herself for whichever of her coworkers needs her already- but it’s not one of them, and in retrospect it hadn’t sounded like them at all.

It’s an old man, his face white with stubble, clutching pruning shears in front of him. “Oh,” he says again, and he starts to laugh “I was not expecting you up here, not at all, you about gave me a heart attack.”

She waves a foreleg at him, trying to be calming and inoffensive. He waves back.

“I knew there was an alien in the building, but I wasn’t ever expecting to actually meet them. And then, well, I thought I was going to get eaten as revenge for a lifetime of gardening, but I suppose you get that a lot.” He laughs.

She wiggles her antennae in amusement. She did get that a lot, in fact, but she was used to it.

“So uh- you like it up here? I didn’t think people tended to come up here, to be honest.”

She nods, shrugs, nods again. There’s no way this man knows Mantid signing, so she’s just going to have to make do.

“For a moment there I just assumed the camellia bush had bloomed out of season- no one told me what a delightful color you were, to be sure, but if it were the right season, you’d blend right in.”

She tilts her head, looks at the bushes, looks back at the man. How could there be flowers from these scrawny bushes? Weren’t flowers supposed to come from the ground? She points at the small flowers growing in the decorative grass, does her best to project confusion.

“Ah, you’re new here, right? Well, come winter, these bushes bloom some right pretty red flowers. See?” he says, pulling down part of the bush. “You can already see the buds.”

The replacement remembers the red flowers from the funeral, and looks at the bushes with something close to awe. She had never imagined they could bloom, but there the buds are, proof. She touches a bud gently with a foreleg, looks over at the man.

“If you like this,” he says, “you should come over to the botanical gardens sometime. I can show you around. I only come up here for maintenance once in a while myself, I spend most of my time over there keeping an eye on things.”

The replacement nods, patting the bushes fondly, and the man smiles.

———

She visits him, and he shows her around, and it is everything she could have dreamed of. She comes back again and again, and he starts learning her sign language, and she is happier than she can ever remember being this time around.

Quietly, she starts typing all the notes about her predecessor’s lab experiments that she can possibly remember. They won’t lack for information when she is gone.

The botanists wonder why she’s stopped hassling them, but they don’t dare to question it. Her coworkers are just happy she’s gone back to something resembling normal.

———

Once, while watering down at the gardens, she finds a tiny praying mantis hiding in the flowers. They stare at each other for a long moment- then the breeze picks up and the flowers sway and the small mantis skitters away.

The man laughs at her when she tells him.

“There’s a fair few that hang out around here,” he says, teasing. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to have collected one more!”

She sprays him with the hose, and he laughs and laughs and laughs.

———

The lab manager is confused, staring at a pile of paperwork and data files. “Okay,” he says to the lab at large. “Who the hell is Camellia and why have they just put in for retirement?”

The replacement perks up, giving the lab manager a wave. He mouths silently for a moment, flips through the collected files of everything they need to continue the experiments without her, then collects himself enough to say, “Ah. Well then. Carry on.”

———

Camellia shows up to her first day of work at the botanical gardens a few weeks later.

On the roof of her old lab building, the camellia bushes bloom.


End file.
